by Colin Grant
She was as passionate as Garvey, sharing his belief in the need for the salvation of the race. The miracle of her education bore testimony to the pathology of Jamaica and the desire for its redemption. Westwood had been founded in 1880 by a Baptist minister who abhorred the prejudices exhibited by the parents of light-skinned students, fretting over their possible contamination by too close a proximity to blacks. When admissions policies proved lax enough to let in darker-skinned girls, these anxious parents simply withdrew their brown children from the schools.
Westwood High School closed its doors to no child, no matter her colour. Buoyed by the financial support of a committee of philanthropic English ladies, the school charged moderate fees, and aimed to compete with more prestigious institutions offering ‘all the advantages of a fair English education, residence in England only excepted’. In practice this was rudimentary. And yet the ebony-skinned Amy Ashwood excelled, despite the constraints of a prospectus – French, drawing, painting and music aside – that prided itself on guaranteeing ‘a thorough instruction in all matters pertaining to household management’.
On 31 October 1914, the smartly turned-out audience in the wooden-panelled chambers of Collegiate Hall, rented that evening by the UNIA, warmed to her recitation of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘The Lover and the Moon’ during the weekly meeting of the society; she also wrote and performed in charming dialogues, and was the equal of any UNIA member on the debating platform. Its titular head put Ashwood forward for election as secretary of the UNIA’s ladies’ division – not that there was much competition. At present, there were almost as many titled officers as there were members. Garvey’s sister Indiana made up the numbers, and each new convert was pressed into evangelical service, to return with a family member or friend. Remarkably, the island’s newspapers seemed to chronicle each stage of the association’s development with the affection of a doting parent. In an article entitled ‘Some Worthy Efforts’, the Jamaica Times reported, ‘Marcus Garvey has started here the Negro Universal Society which has excellent aims and has made a promising beginning.’11 The admiration of these conservative journals reflected an approval of Garvey and his organisation’s patriotism – not only apparent in the lusty singing of the national anthem at the end of each meeting, but also in their leader’s breast-thumping avowal of allegiance to the Crown in letters to the Prime Minister and senior figures of the establishment, supporting the war effort. Garvey was in step with the brave sons of empire marching towards the Somme in the deathly struggle with the Kaiser’s army.
In a much-touted resolution passed by the UNIA, Garvey wrote to George V that, ‘being mindful of the great protecting and civilising influence of the English nation … and their justice to all men, especially their Negro subjects … [we] hereby beg to express our loyalty and devotion to His Majesty the King, and Empire … We sincerely pray for the success of British arms on the battle fields of Europe and Africa, and at Sea, in crushing the Common Foe.’12
The authorities were delighted. Sir Gilbert Grindle of the Colonial Office was gratifyingly surprised by such loyal sentiments and went on to confess, ‘I blush to think that I once suggested to Mr Marcus Garvey that he should go to the workhouse.’
No one doubted the expression of unrivalled affection laid before the King. It captured the fervour of Jamaicans who, in their thousands, threw off ‘the influence of the deadening tropical languor’, and, answering ‘the canon’s summoning roar’, were soon volunteering to serve the empire.13 Not least because the honour of military engagement would surely be recognised at the cessation of hostilities, and equally, sincere and devout pronouncements on behalf of the UNIA might also prove expedient. In the short term, such uncomplicated devotion meant that significant figures in the colonial administration were more kindly disposed towards the movement. It was a down payment of goodwill. But patience and caution were virtues yet to take root: Garvey was a man in a hurry. The Jamaica Times was right. He’d made an excellent start, and very soon was pressing home his advantage; one by one the gatekeepers of every facet of Jamaican society were charmed. The Mayor of Kingston was a sizeable prize. A sweep of the business community netted scores of philanthropic patrons, but Garvey reserved his greatest skills for the courtship of the Governor. Sir William Manning wrote a cheery letter to Garvey on 7 December 1914 pledging his support and adding a respectable £2.00 to the collection basket. As well as charitable work for the relief of the poor, Garvey also began to conceive a bigger scheme. At this stage of his and the movement’s development, Garvey had visions of founding an ‘industrial farm’, a vocational training college in Jamaica modelled on the Tuskegee Institute, that was underpinned with its founder, Booker T. Washington’s, practical conviction that ‘there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem’.14
Were Marcus Garvey to have undertaken an audit of the year, then the credit sheet, with its roll call of the great and the good of mostly white Jamaican high society, looked greatly encouraging. Work still needed to be done on the resistant strain of his race but even Amy Ashwood’s mother, Maude, showed signs of succumbing to the UNIA maestro’s Midas touch. If ‘dubious’ Maude Ashwood could be coaxed out of her living quarters – the other half of Orange Street – and converted to the cause, then anything was possible.
Mrs Ashwood can’t, though, have failed to notice the trilling in her daughter’s voice when she stepped out in Garvey’s company: a mutual appreciation of intellect was daily blossoming into an amorous attachment, which was all the more apparent for their attempts to hide it. Maude’s resolve to separate the paramours was more than matched by her daughter’s ingenuity in circumventing the restrictions. When Amy was locked in her room and banned from attending UNIA meetings, she schemed with the maid to swap places with her while she slipped out through the bedroom window. The ruse worked well enough for a while until one evening as Amy spoke from the platform of a UNIA event at Collegiate Hall, she looked up to see a frowning Maude in the audience. Maude would keep her own counsel no longer and immediately sent a telegram to her husband in Panama City. Alarmed by the reports coming out of Kingston, and suspicious of Garvey’s intentions towards his now eighteen-year-old daughter, Michael Ashwood was soon on the high seas, rushing back to Jamaica. In the baker and restaurateur’s estimation, the young Marcus Garvey was not ostensibly a man of great prospects. Mr Ashwood had something better in mind for Amy than a suitor who, despite his growing stature, presently eked out a living selling greeting and condolence cards (a large stock had recently been shipped over from Britain). When that enterprise proved less than lucrative, Garvey had tried his hand at selling monumental tombstones.15 Amy would not retreat – she would not give up her Napoleon, nor he his Josephine. Her father’s protests served only to fan the flames of the romance, and in 1915, Amy Ashwood and Marcus Garvey were secretly engaged.
The Spanish–Irish heiress needed to be notified that his affections were now directed elsewhere. In any case his resolve to defy convention had dribbled away. In her memoir, Amy Ashwood related that Garvey wrote to his fiancée soon after, breaking off the engagement. Garvey’s letter has not been found and Amy Ashwood’s account is almost certainly a paraphrase of the original in which Garvey makes the sober observation, ‘Marriage between us is now impossible. You will be far happier with a member of your own race; so will I be with one of mine.’ According to Amy Ashwood, Garvey begged forgiveness from the heiress. He told her, ‘I have seen a girl, blood of my blood and of my own race.’16
As Amy Ashwood was to recall, theirs was a partnership steeped in the movement: there was no separation between love and labour, so that a hand-holding, moonlit stroll down by the bay was immediately followed by the more pressing business of planning the running order of speeches for the next UNIA meeting. ‘Your Napoleon is longing to see you, longing to gaze into your beautiful eyes,’ Garvey wrote breathlessly, only to continue, on a more sober note with, ‘Let no mother, no father, no sister, no brother stand in the way of
the redemption of Africa. I will always worship at your shrine.’17 Garvey’s relationship with Amy Ashwood was intense and passionate and, occasionally, melodramatic. ‘He loved in the grand manner,’ wrote Ashwood, ‘and was soon urging me to announce our engagement openly … I took the precaution of only wearing the ring when my mother was out of sight.’ Only weeks later Ashwood decided that their relationship was too intense and problematic, and decided to suspend their engagement. ‘Returning home, I discovered a note from Marcus. He poured out such a torrent of feeling that my youthful sensibilities were almost overwhelmed.’ At the end of the letter Garvey warned that he was going to commit suicide by ‘throwing himself into the sea’. Ashwood hailed a taxi and ‘rushed to that section of the beach where Marcus was accustomed to promenade. There he was and I almost collapsed with relief at finding him on time.’ The engagement was renewed.18
The UNIA-sponsored musical and literary evenings at the Collegiate Hall could now count on a regular and loyal following but membership was still modest and stuck below the 100 mark. To attract a larger audience the board settled on the popular idea of a competition, a biannual elocution contest. There was, however, little chance of certain officers holding back to allow the public to come to the fore. As the young competitors took to the rostrum, the pedigree of one man in particular was most apparent: a beautiful gold watch adorned the breast pocket of the UNIA president when he took first prize on 23 February 1915 for his party piece, a recitation of ‘Chatham on the American War’. Garvey had long been inspired by the ‘trumpet of sedition’ – as the King referred to the Earl of Chatham. Garvey’s rendition of Chatham’s passionate House of Lords’ speech, which attempted to avert the American War of Independence, served a double purpose: to remind the audience of the need to free itself from ‘mental slavery’, and of their own, much overlooked involvement and fortitude in key historical moments. In that War of Independence, large numbers of black slaves in the Americas – seduced by the promise of freedom held out by the British – hedged their bets and sided with King George III. But whether they crossed the lines or stayed loyal to their slave masters, the gallantry of Negro infantry had been recorded for posterity.
The subject of sacrifice and its reward was one that Garvey would default to at almost every opportunity in the coming months. Though the German threat to British sovereignty in the Antilles warranted little more than the vigilant bicycle patrols around the island that kept watch for spies and enemy ships, like the recently captured Bethania, the war in Europe inspired Garvey to reflect on previous military conflicts in which the black sons of empire had comported themselves with honour. It was a theme guaranteed to resonate with an audience who hungered after any recognition not determined by the colour of their skin. Most keenly felt were memories of British military campaigns of the 1890s, when volunteers of the first and second battalions of the West India Regiment – almost entirely recruited from Jamaica – gave further proof that, in suppressing rebel tribes in Gambia, the Caribbean colonial was just as willing and capable of dying for imperial integrity.
Twenty years later, Jamaicans were still celebrating the achievement of Lance-Corporal William J. Gordon, awarded the Victoria Cross for valour in the field on 13 March 1892, during a British army offensive at Toniataba in Gambia. Gordon had saved a major’s life, pushing him out of the line of fire and throwing himself in front of enemy musket muzzles. In the margins of the British Empire – where there was little to shout about – these individual acts of bravery were emblazoned on the hearts of black subjects.
But Jamaica was only a subplot. In 1915, the bigger story was, as always, elsewhere. Daily, the local newspapers carried rousing bulletins of virile manhood in the carnage of Flanders Fields. Garvey, the patriot, was preoccupied with the notion of a war full of noble deeds, in which Caribbean men might be denied the opportunity to show that they too were brave enough to face ‘an appointment with a bullet’.19
In April, the UNIA invited Brigadier General L. S. Blackden, commander of the local Jamaican forces, to deliver a lecture on the war. Garvey would later endorse the brigadier’s call to arms, for the most able men to come forward and take up the privilege of military service in forming a Jamaican contingent. Indian troops, shipped over in their thousands to plug the gaps left by the enormous number of casualties suffered among the British Expeditionary Force, had already been valiantly engaged in battle on the Western Front. Whilst Jamaicans took pride in these Indian triumphs, there was a danger that they themselves might miss out on the glory. The thousands of volunteers presented an awkward dilemma for the local authorities who were protective of the racially stratified social order that had served them so well. What lasting lesson might be learnt by those deferential colonised people once granted the qualified privilege of killing a white enemy? It needed to be stressed that though the German was undeniably coarse, he was surpassed only by the Englishman in evolutionary development. And were it not for the absurd and hateful imposition of Prussian militarism on his character, then he might still be redeemed to civilisation. Foe that he was, one killed him reluctantly; he was not to be confused with the African blacks upon whom the West India Regiment had been unleashed during the Asante Wars of 1873–1874.
Brigadier Blackden, whom the Negro Society had earlier received so warmly, was soon complaining about the quality of the recruits, and that military prestige was being dispersed to the wrong sort, who all too often were ‘an undersized, ragged, barefooted set of fellows, who came forward probably to get a meal’. Blackden conceded that whilst there was ‘room for the muscle that drives the bayonet home, there is more room for the brain that can use the complicated weapons of modern warfare’.20
Garvey and his society had much more time for the ragged and barefooted populace and, as the title of its organisation suggested, harboured great ambitions for their improvement. Perhaps emboldened by the success of the first year, Garvey now made a false move. Setting out his agenda for the new improved Negro, he gave a blunt assessment of the scale of the problem in a speech delivered at Collegiate Hall which was subsequently reproduced in the pages of the Daily Chronicle: ‘To the cultured mind the bulk of our people are contemptible,’ wrote Garvey. ‘Go into the country parts of Jamaica and you will see there villainy and vice of the worse kind, immorality, obeah and all kinds of dirty things … Kingston and its environs are so infested with the uncouth and vulgar of our people that we of the cultured class feel positively ashamed to move about. Well, this society has set itself the task to go among the people … and raise them to the standard of civilised approval.’21
The overall sentiment may have been encouraging and sincere, but the detail of the script read like something penned by Brigadier Blackden. Such unsparing and unflattering language, reprinted in a national newspaper, was bound to provoke. Garvey was taken off guard by the severity of the response, especially from sections of the brown middle class whose resentment towards him had been festering for more than a year. Dr Leo Pink was particularly incensed on behalf of the ‘contemptible, filthy and vulgar’ compatriots. Dr Pink warned Garvey that ‘the Jamaican Negro can not be reformed by abuse’, and went on to ask sarcastically, ‘Were he [Garvey] appointed missionary to the penitentiary, would he go into that institution and call the inmates thieves?’ Garvey answered that Pink’s complaint was mere camouflage. The real source of Pink’s ill-temper was that ‘nearly every high official (including the Colonial Secretary and Brigadier General) had given them [the UNIA] words of cheer.’22 The UNIA president had indeed trespassed on the natural turf of men such as Dr Pink, ingratiating himself, as they saw it, with the Governor, and writing fawning, congratulatory telegrams to the King on the occasion of his birthday.
To further enlarge on his acquaintance with persons of influence, he’d even managed to get himself on the guest list for a banquet in honour of the visiting black American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois – the highlight of the social calendar. On 3 May 1915, the Gleaner printed the roll call
of the country’s representative men invited to the banquet to pay tribute to the distinguished guest who certainly ‘belonged to the aristocracy of intellect in America’. The name Marcus Garvey did not appear on the abridged list (the young UNIA leader had not yet achieved sufficient national prominence), but in subsequent years the noble-headed and neatly trimmed Du Bois would recount that he was especially pleased, after the garden reception, to receive a polite and deferential note from his future rival: ‘Mr Marcus Garvey presents his compliment to Dr W. E. B. Du Bois and begs to tender to him, on behalf of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a hearty welcome to Jamaica, and trusts that he has enjoyed the brief stay in the sunny isle.’23
While Du Bois returned to New York secure in his position as an established champion of black civil rights, the thus far underappreciated Marcus Garvey was just at the beginning of his master plan to become a race leader. As far as the mulattos, quadroons and octoroons who filled the ranks of the respectable middle class were concerned, it was galling enough that this pretentious social climber who’d emerged tainted by the squalor of Smith Village had the temerity to challenge their claim to being the true representatives of the race; what particularly stuck in the craw was his supposed alignment with the ‘cultured class’.